Killing Motivation and Productivity

So I recently read a post from the Sloan Management Review discussing how releasing plans can be a detriment to your objectives.  See Announcing Plans May Kill Motivation, Productivity.

One of the areas not addressed in the study is the impact others may take from releasing your intentions and plans.  Leslie Brokaw, author, discusses how when you release your plans you may feel like you have accomplished something and afterward will not pursue the enacting of those plans with fervor.

“Conventional wisdom, of course, would have predicted the opposite result: By making a resolution and telling other people about it, we think we’re putting pressure on ourselves to follow through.” Instead, sharing our goals too often lets us simply “congratulate ourselves just for making the resolution.”

This may certainly be the case, but I would suggest that releasing those plans when others are involved can also lead to reducing motivation and productivity by others.  Take organizational changes in business.  How many times have we seen people react to future planning events by trying to protect their turf or getting upset by leadership changes all before anything happens.  All of this leads to lowering productivity and in some cases loss of valuable employees.

Not that I have a good answer on how to deal with these problems.  Organizational consultants will discuss how you must engage soonest on organizational changes to avoid this conflict.  Employees will be  grateful for the engagements as they walk out of the room disgruntled with changes, whether it effects them or not.   The sheer time spent talking about the changes is a distraction and loss of productivity to the business.

So maybe the take away here is to announce the changes/intentions at the last possible moment when all of your time can be spent in enacting them in the quickly and in a least distracting manner involving constant discussions with the employees that are effected.  Just a thought.